Sarah Polley, Mary Harron, and the Decade-Long Friendship That Led to Alias Grace

Harron and Polley at the TIFF World Premiere of "Alias Grace" on September 14th.

By Ernesto Di Stefano Photography/WireImage.

When Sarah Polley first asked Mary Harron to direct the adaptation of Alias Grace she’d wanted to make literally her entire adult life, Harron’s first impulse was to talk her out of it. “I worry Sarah will regret this,” Harron remembers saying to their mutual manager at the time, who responded, “Sarah doesn't regret things.”

“I thought that she didn’t want to direct it because she was pregnant,” Harron said in a recent phone call. “This is speaking as a woman director who has also had children—I was just going to give her advice. ‘I know it seems like a lot to take on, but by the time you get financed, you’re going to be ready to go back to filming.’ That was in my head.”

It was the sort of conversation that rarely happens in Hollywood for all kinds of reasons—a woman director offering work to another; a mother offering advice to another; a director attempting to turn down a job. But it was a natural turn for the mentoring relationship Harron and Polley have built since first meeting in the early aughts, when Harron was considering casting Polley, still an actress at that point, in a film about the 1970s punk scene in New York.

“I remember reading this script she had written. There was a part in it of a character who’s quite internal and a journalist,” Polley remembered recently. “And it was based on Mary, I think. It was the most obvious part for me to play.” When the two met, though, Polley got to talking about an “Amazonian” character named Connie—a “completely out of control, crazy-giant, completely flamboyant woman.” Polley had never played anyone like her. “And I remember her going, ‘Oh, why don’t you play that then?’ It was my dream to play someone like that; no one had ever seen me that way. It was that quintessential Mary moment of completely trusting her instinct about something.”

The movie, tragically, never happened. But a friendship was born, and maybe even more: “I told my husband after I felt she was one of my family, like a young cousin,” Harron said. A few years later, when Polley made her directorial debut with Away From Her, Harron attended an early screening. “She’s been very supportive of me as an artist,” Polley said. “Since I made my first film, she always made herself available.”

So, when Polley adapted Margaret Atwood’sAlias Grace into a six-episode mini-series, and asked Harron to direct it, Harron’s impulse was to respond more as a mentor than a collaborator. “It took a while for me to convince her I felt like her sensibility was going to benefit this more than mine,” Polley said.

That sensibility wasn’t just about Harron’s comfort with killers; before Alias Grace, which stars Sarah Gadon as Canada’s “most notorious murderess” Grace Marks, she made two seminal films about murderers or attempted ones, with 1996’s I Shot Andy Warhol and 2000’s American Psycho. With a degree in English literature from Oxford, and a passion for period pieces that don’t pretend to be modern, Harron was drawn to the adaptation Polley had written, which focused in excruciating detail on the difficult lives of poor women in Victorian Canada. “I had never read something that seemed so right for me,” said Harron, who grew up in Ontario. “Growing up in the nice liberal Canada that I knew, and then realizing that actually, no, it was this very harsh, class-ridden British colonial society—I found that fantastically interesting.”

By Sabrina Lantos/Netflix.

Though it has many visual trappings of a standard-issue period piece—women in petticoats, stately houses, carriages, top hats—Alias Grace is concerned with the backbreaking labor that created the illusion of a genteel world. “I grew up on this Disney Channel-C.B.C. thing, Road to Avonlea, which is exactly the kind of thing that completely idealizes the past,” Polley said, referencing the early 90s TV series in which she starred as a child. “I’d grown up with a real aversion to an inauthentic nostalgic look at the past.”

Alias Grace, which constantly slips between time periods and narratives and points of view, spares no detail, from the rats on the boat Grace takes with her family from Ireland to Toronto, to the root vegetables kept in the cellar at the farmhouse where Grace works as a maid, and whose occupants—played by Anna Paquin and Paul Gross—she’ll be accused of murdering.

“Mary has a ruthlessness in the way she sees the world, and a brutal clarity that Margaret Atwood has,” Polley said. “She sees what’s uncomfortable in human nature much more readily than I do. I knew that I would hold back a little bit if I directed this, and I knew Mary wouldn’t.”

Harron relished the period details, sending the actresses playing servants to “period boot camp” at Black Creek Pioneer Village outside of Toronto, and filming entire montages of Grace’s grueling work. “Whenever you see her, she’s doing something,” Harron said. “When she’s doing laundry, she’s scrubbing it on a washboard, hanging handkerchiefs out to bleach. I shot tons of it.”

At first, Alias Grace does not seem as pointed toward the present as The Handmaid’s Tale, the Atwood TV adaptation that struck such a nerve, women have started wearing handmaid costumes to political protests. But with hashtags like #believewomen ricocheting around the Internet in the wake of high-profile sexual-assault allegations—and Polley herself one of the many revealing she was harassed by Harvey Weinstein—the way that Alias Grace imbues power in a woman’s story, and reveals the toll it takes when she cannot reveal it, starts to feel revolutionary. “If you’re in a world that has no interest in your response to these things, needs you to hide and make these responses disappear, what happens to the self?” Polley said. “For me, that’s a universal question about women.”